20,000 problems plague new Berlin airport

Rather than announcing a final opening date for Berlin's much-delayed new airport, authorities are turning their attention to classifying structural problems. So far they've found 20,000 flaws.

According to the Bild am Sonntag newspaper, tens of thousands of issues have so far been identified, ranging from faulty exhaust ventilation systems to broken tiles. The board responsible for the new airport aims to systematically eliminate each problem listed in the report.

Each defect will be given a rating from A (high priority) to D (low priority). Rainer Bomba of the Federal Transport Ministry told the paper his priority was “absolute transparency" and that he wanted “not just disasters but the construction process” documented.

Experts believe it’s unlikely the airport will open before 2014. In the past week, it was decided to invest tens of millions into modernizing Tegel, Berlin’s ageing western airport, which along with Schonefeld in the east, will have to deal with the city’s air traffic for the foreseeable future.

The Local/kkf

Your comments about this article

If you consider the size of this project, and the number of contractors and sub-contractors....the number here doesn't surprise me. We can talk about loose management or non-existent project management, but it doesn't fix the issue now. This identification of each problem helps to focus people just on fixing what is left, and probably will keep them on the new schedule.

No one is really sure about the necessity of Berlin having this mega-sized airport. It's supposed to be a magnet and create a new passenger trend into Germany for the next fifty years. The thing is...most international airlines are very happy with Frankfurt, and not likely to make the move to Berlin. So other than Berlin-destined passengers....that might be the end-result for a massive amount of funding.

While the mis-management is obvious, the idea that this is an organized scam falls apart on one simple basis: Nobody could organize something like that on this level, and if they did, too many people would know about it and somebody would talk. It's like the grand conspiracy that NASA didn't really land on the moon. If it were true, and everything we saw was faked, two things would have happened...one back then and one since then. First, the Russians would have been able to figure out the landings didn't really happen, and they certainly wouldn't have kept their knowledge secret. Second, too many people would have been involved, and somebody would have spilled the beans.

Inept, screw-up, mis-managed, poorly designed? Yup, probably all those things and more. An organized scam? Highly unlikely. Just too many people would have to be in on it, and somebody would talk.

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